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Red, white and blue: The colors and lines of the Union Flag are deployed as Great British Railways logo (GBR), a nationalized body that will replace the existing patchwork of mostly private train firms running on public infrastructure.
Speaking in front of a “pop-up” showing the new branding at London Bridge station, Heidi Alexander, the Transport Secretary, said: “I am extremely proud to unveil the new look.” Great British Railways,
Yet, out of the 150,000 or so passengers starting or ending their journeys at London Bridge station on Tuesday, I saw only a handful showing interest in how Great British Railways I will see. What every rail traveler wants to know: Will my experience from purchasing a ticket to reaching my destination be improved?
The Railway Minister, Lord Hendy, believes that resolving the current corporate disputes would yield immediate benefits: “Just ask a railway manager and they will tell you how complicated negotiations are. By the time there are meetings and tables with 20 people, you don’t get anything done. You can’t change a light bulb without something like that. It’s not the right way to run a railway.
“We are going to rekindle the passion of railway people and managers to provide better service, increase revenues and reduce costs, by giving them real authority – not this huge set of contractual negotiations.”
Lord Hendy gives the example of Steve White, managing director of South Eastern Railway: running trains between London and Kent, and also having responsibility for the tracks, signaling and stations.
“If points fail or drivers don’t turn up, he has no one to blame. He and his management team have to fix it. I want the railways to have people who pay attention to what customers want. That’s the way to run a better railway.”
Improving operations is one thing; Sorting out fares and booking tickets are completely different things. “We are on our way to completely reform a fare system that doesn’t work,” the minister says.
“In urban areas, what people want is pay-as-you-go. I used to drive TfL (Transport for London). You put your card on the machine; you trust the machine to charge you the right amount of money.”
Some say the best way to simplify fares is to return to the principle of getting what you pay for: charging per mile, as was the case for third class passengers. For seven decades the rate was one old penny (0.4p).
But the minister says the pay-per-mile return doesn’t work for long-distance travel. The result, he says, will be a 6pm LNER departure from London King’s Cross for Edinburgh, with “about 14,000 people trying to catch it on a Friday evening”. Their aim is to “try and smooth the edges so that the first off-peak train doesn’t have people hanging out of the windows, and the last peak train doesn’t end up half empty because the fares are so high no one wants to pay them”.
Top of the agenda for Great British Railways: a website and app to deliver tickets smoothly. Yet independent rail retailers – notably Trainline – are already doing just that. So why would GBR want its own version?
“We currently have 14 train company websites,” he told me. “They all work differently, they all look different, and they all work differently.
“Any decent retailer would bring so many things together, get the best out of them, and sell their product to the public without booking fees. That’s what GBR will do. I think that’s fair enough.
“There should be a level playing field. There are some big guys in that market – Trainline – and some small guys; they should all have access to the same fares. But there’s no reason why GBR shouldn’t sell its products well. You’d expect it in John Lewis and you’d expect it in Tesco, so you should expect it in Great British Railways.”